As you know, Texas was hit by a freak snowstorm earlier this year, which caused the power grid to collapse. I’m worried it’ll happen again. Do you think it will?
Almost guaranteed. As weather patterns shift we’ll all be seeing more storms like this. Will it be this winter? 
Eventually? Sure. This year? Probably not.
I believe that NOAA is predicting are warmer than average winter in Texas this year.
[Moderating]
Was this meant to be in Cafe Society? It looks more like IMHO to me.
Moving.
It probably depends in part on where in Texas…
Winter will be colder than normal, especially in the south, with the coldest periods in mid- to late November, mid- and late December, and early and late January. Precipitation will be below normal in the north and above normal in the south. Snowfall will be near normal, with the best chances for snow in early and late January, mainly in the north.
As had been said, yes, it’s likely a similarly strong winter storm is bound to hit Texas in the future. Could it happen again this winter? It’s possible, but severe weather events, like hurricanes for example, tend to happen infrequently, so it’s not likely to happen again this winter… but it certainly could.
I mean, the last big winter storm to hit us and knock lots of power out was 2011. And before that in '98. Those didn’t knock out quite as much power but they were bad enough for some. They’re not exactly uncommon, though I don’t expect them every year.
Major hurricanes hit us here on the Gulf Coast a bit more commonly, but they’re also not annual events.
Let me specify.
Will Texas be hit by a huge snowstorm in 2022?
At the scale of the 2021 disaster? We can’t know.
But a wise man would have spent 2021 insulating his pipes and getting a decent reserve of firewood. Because better to have and not need…
Pipes, I agree with to an extent - the building codes around here let plenty of piping in attics and on exterior walls, but firewood is just asking for deaths. Home down here generally aren’t built with those kinds of fireplaces. Several of the deaths we had this year were people dying in fires getting out of hand from makeshift fire pits rather than from cold.
If we (collectively) were that wise to begin with, we wouldn’t have kept voting for people who let electrical infrastructure get that bad in the first place just to line the pockets of a few well connected people.
ETA: also, re: major snowstorms - it’s not very likely to happen in any given year. But sometime in the next 10? Sure. More so if you live in the panhandle. But one like this year? Historic. It was once or twice in a lifetime level cold in the Houston area.
Indeed so, and that’s true for areas which normally do get substantial snow and cold in the winter – meteorology simply can’t predict extreme weather events with that kind of certainty, that far in advance.
Here in Chicago, we can sometimes go several years without a major winter storm (i.e., the sort that can largely shut the city down for a day).
But, what we do know is that climate change is leading to extreme weather events becoming more common (and, often, more intense when they do happen). We now hear about areas that get “100 year storms” (i.e., storms of the level that only occurred in that area roughly once every 100 years) happening twice in the span of a decade.
I’d assume that it’s not only a non-zero chance for another big snowstorm hitting Texas in any given year, but that the odds of it may well be higher now than they had been, historically speaking.
Perhaps my memory is faulty, but wasn’t it more a case of a cold snap and ice than SNOW, exactly?
Maybe every decade or so we get a winter storm of note, but even that doesn’t mean something of the magnitude that we experienced in February of this year. I mean, I’ve lived in North Texas for 22 years now, and I can recall a handful of times when the low temperatures were in the teens, 3 times that it was in the single-digits, and ONCE (February 2021) when it was actually negative.
The 2011 storm wasn’t particularly cold- temps in the teens around here. But what made it unique for the state was the duration; IIRC it snowed/iced, then we had a couple days of clear but below freezing weather, and then it snowed on top of that again- it was about a week with no highs above freezing and two precipitation events. That made getting around problematic.
The fundamental problem is that a big swath of the state rarely even encounters lows below freezing. If I had to guess, that line is somewhere around the center of the state- probably 40-50 miles north of a San Antonio/Austin/Nacogdoches line. I do know that freezing temps are very rare in the Houston area- maybe a small handful of nights a year, and slightly less so in Austin. DFW gets them maybe a couple times a month during the winter. The plant hardiness map isn’t quite the full picture- it’s based on the average lowest temp encountered in those areas over a 30-ish year period.
texas_map_lg.gif (906×859) (gardeningknowhow.com)
So as a result, a LOT of the state has electrical heating. Imagine a big toaster hooked up to your HVAC air handler to heat your house, and you’re on the right track. It’s inefficient as hell, but likely far cheaper than setting up natural gas to your home after the fact, and oil heating just isn’t a thing here. And for the amount of heating that needs to be done somewhere like Houston in the average winter, it’s just not a big deal.
But when the temps are considerably lower than average and for a considerably longer period, the power demands shoot WAY up- people are running their electric heaters more often and longer than they normally would. That’s why it’s such a spike in demand- I get the impression that electric heating is considerably less efficient than air conditioning.
Combine that spike in demand with these generation company and gas supply dickbags who haven’t winterized their facilities, and you have a recipe for what happened in February.
Eventually Texas will get more severe winter weather on a par with 2020.
Houston got 20 inches of snow on Valentine’s Day, 1895. Imagine the apocalyptic ravings if that happened again.
There’s a long history (not just in Texas) of people shrugging off extreme weather events and saying “Oh, that’s a freak event/hundred-year storm, it’ll never happen again” and failing to fix things to minimize damage and suffering. Long into the future, commonplace freezes will result in dire warnings to the populace to protect “pipes, plants and pets” (oh my).
Moderating:
This is a reminder to you that you have been specifically warned quite recently and directed to drop all posts and threads on the topic of the American South, which includes the state of Texas. I am reminding you of this directive only once. Any further posts or topics on the subject by you will result in another warning, at a minimum, and/or possibly a suspension.
This is a common misconception. The descriptor “100 year storm” does not mean that such a storm will happen once every 100 years. What it means is that there is a 1% chance of such a storm happening every year–so that, over several millennia, the overall average will be once per hundred years–but the very nature of statistics means that unlikely events will occasionally occur close together.
While this is true, it’s also meaningless in current times.
It’s not like we have thousands of years of statistics to draw from. The 100 year (and 500 year and so on) designations were based on existing data, and those estimates require updates.
What were once considered 200 or 300 year storms in Houston (a city that hasn’t really existed for 200 years) are now considered 100 year storms. And what were considered 100 year storms are now much more likely - certainly more than a 1% chance of happening each year.
You can argue this means our statistics weren’t great to begin with (likely true!), but the preponderance of other evidence also indicates that such extreme weather events are also occurring with greater frequency than historic and geologic records suggest for this region.
There was significant snowfall associated with the storm. It varied across the state, but in Austin we saw 6-8 inches of snow which was the fourth highest recorded snowfall in the city since 1898.
I actually do understand this – I have studied both statistics and meteorology. 
The point still stands that weather events which had historically occurred very infrequently (i.e., the “hundred-year storm”) are happening more frequently now. Yes, it’s possible that it’s just the nature of statistics…but the fact that this is occurring more often, in more places, points to the likelihood that the odds themselves have changed, due to changes in the climate.